Supermoon
by EventHorizon6
Summary: "I am alone surrounded by rolling cliffs and sparse vegetation. I have no memories. I am haunted by hallucinations. All that remains is my broken ship...and the Atlas."


-1-

Sovereign

I hear a voice inside my head. Dominating. Commanding.

 _Wake up_ , it says. _Wake up_.

The scent of smoke is heavy in my nose and mouth now as I crack open my eyes. They sting. I feel heat and I taste blood. Then, the rush of sudden realization. My ship losing elevation, spiraling through the stars. My anxiety becoming paramount as I am forced to surrender my vessel to a nearby planet. Gravity, and I am falling, falling.

I jerk back in the seat of my small cruiser and wince at the pain that seizes me for a moment. Smoke fills the compartment. Flames are burning outside of the glass. I assess myself. No broken bones, no lacerated limbs – it seems as though the protective gear installed in the compartment has succeeded in saving my life. Though, my nose runs red from a grievous face-to-console smacking. I use the sleeve of my shirt to stem the blood flow with one arm and with the other reach out to…

To what?

I do not know these controls. I do not know this ship. I rub my forehead, thinking it a temporary result of the crash. But the more I strain myself to think, recall, perceive, the quicker I understand how much I have lost. I visualize the crash, the sensation of falling, but what sent me gyrating into this corner of the galaxy?

To keep the panic down, I swallow and study the console. Something must be familiar. The flames are still licking at my vehicle. The small space I am trapped in is losing oxygen to the smoke. I cough, my throat burns, and involuntarily my hand pushes up on the glass ceiling. The hatch lifts with ease – it must have unlocked itself upon impact. At once the smoke escapes into the open air of the planet. I mean to stand when something at the hip of my suit tugs me back. It's a small panel connected by wires to the mainframe of the ship. I pull and it releases the way a magnet is stripped from a metal surface.

"Unstable Environment Detected."

It's the voice of my suit and ship. Almost at once my head is enveloped by a mask, to protect my face, which is snuggly secured below my neck. Small holographic points light up in the corners to provide options. And then I remember.

Not my memories, but the ship, the suit, the mask, the pieces. It's as if knowledge is trickling back into my mind. I find the button amidst the array of switches that busts nitrogen and CO2 between my engines, extinguishing the flames at last. After solving one crisis, I relax in the seat of my cruiser and close my eyes to think. What could have happened that would cause me to crash and lose my memories? Did I even have a name? How was I supposed to survive with a broken star ship on an unfamiliar planet?

"Who am I?" I ask. The weight of the universe is pressing down and suddenly sitting feels suffocating. My eyes fly open and I struggle to my feet. The planet all around me is barren with nothing but rolling rocky hills and fungi sprouting up in pairs. The sun is high but barred by wisps of cloud. It will rain soon. My suit tells me it is 6 degrees Celsius. I mean to slide out of the compartment and set to work figuring what minerals I need to repair my vessel when I glimpse the console screen once more.

Username.

Username? I look closer.

Username: Sovereign.

I stare at it. It had not been there before. Was it reacting to my voiced rhetorical question or was it simply a home screen? I shrug it off and bring my feet up over the lip of the hub. With a gentle push, I slide down the steel frame of my ship and hit the packed ground of the planet for the first time. Bits and pieces of my cruiser are thrown about the landscape. This is worse than I thought.

I walk. Information works its way back into my head. I approach each mechanical instrument and some I recognize, others I have to think for a while. I begin to nurture the idea of regaining my memories if I can find familiar places, markers, or items in my environment. If I fix my ship and return to space, will I remember how I crashed? Will I find what destroyed my vessel? The stars hold all the answers regarding my identity and I am seized with a sudden fierce desire to return.

As I approach the last of the outlying ship debris, I notice a rotund shard sleek as a white barrel with a glass dome atop. There is a keypad on the side of the half-buried-in-the-earth cargo drop. I waste no time in unlatching the module as it may contain information on what I was carrying or how I crashed. The glass slides back. I have only seconds to see the pulsating scarlet orb before I am on my knees. Suddenly, my body is not my own. My mind is spinning far and away and blurring and screaming. I am tumbling through space and time. Stars whirl around me in a haze of lights and galaxies and I am the universe.

A voice in my head. "Atlas," it says. The same voice I heard when I awoke. "Atlas."

"Help," I say, but my voice is faint. "Help. Help. Help." I need to stop this madness. Then, I see it. Space rights itself and I see the diamond, a black spot in the sky. Just below its mineral surface lies the orb that was in my container. An amorphous, living, shifting relic. I have a choice. I can reach for it or send myself into the void trying to find my own way back. I make my decision and accept the Atlas' guidance. The world goes white. I am blind.

…Because of the planet's sun. I squeeze my eyes shut. I am on my back. The sun burns my face through the tinted glass of my visor. I sit up to see that the container is empty. Any residue of a fluorescent sphere no longer exists if it ever existed in the first place. An unsettling sensation works knots in my stomach. Was it a dream? A mirage? The planet is no desert. I get to my feet and walk in circles around the canister. I am afraid to touch it, but I have to know if what I saw was real or a hallucination. Could it have been an effect of the crash or had my eyes really seen the sphere? Atlas, the word sings in my thoughts.

I saw something in the vivid trip, an immense black diamond floating at the center of the universe. If it was the entity known as Atlas, what could it want with me? Questions batter about, fueling my anxiety. I am alone surrounded by rolling cliffs and sparse vegetation. Glimmering gemstones spike from the ground in odd intervals. I have no memories. I am haunted by hallucinations. All that remains is my broken ship. I set my teeth and examine my suit closer.

It appears to be connected to my ship through a computer mainframe. I have blueprints stored on how to reassemble my vessel. The clouds accumulate above me. I tilt my head up toward the sky. I know what I must do. The mystery of the Atlas will be waiting when I can return to the stars. An hour – or the equivalent of one going by my suit's clock – commences as I explore more of the landscape in search of minerals to patch my ship. I am harvesting Plutonium when the first drops of acid rain fall.


End file.
